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You Never Write!

Your IT guy and your lawyer like to remind you of the permanence of e-mail, how they live on in digital perpetuity, ready to implicate and humiliate you at some point in the future. But while this may be true, no one really keeps e-mail. You don't print them out and stuff them into that box beneath the bed where there's a motley collection of items of no value to anyone but you. Because no matter how moving the sentiment or how well crafted the words, an e-mail is just an e-mail—a flurry of keystrokes on a computer, sent and received instantaneously. Pffft.

We realize that personalized stationery sounds pretentious—retro for retro's sake—but if you've got a fid address and a passable sense of propriety, stationery is a necessity. Well, that's not entirely true: You could live a fulfilling, if slightly discourteous, life posting thank-you's on Facebook. But if you want your words to be considered with the care and thought with which they were written, you'll put pen to paper—your own paper. You've heard about the jackass who dumped his girlfriend by leaving a Post-it; don't be the guy who e-mails a condolence note. Even if they're the most moving six sentences ever composed, they'll mean more if they're written on paper, if only because they won't arrive sandwiched between a meeting reminder and a come-on for penis enlargement. They'll land in the mailbox, a rare reprieve from the bills and the catalogs, in an envelope to be opened like a gift. So no, it's not a necessity. It's a kind of indulgence—not a self-indulgence, but an indulgence just the same. And if you've made the effort to order your own stationery, err toward understatement and timelessness in its design. Because decades from now, you don't want someone to dig out a note of yours they thought enough of to keep forever and have them laugh at the font.